Book Spotlight: Dog Medicine by Julie Barton

Thank you to Penguin Books for sending me a copy of Dog Medicine: How My Dog Saved Me From Myself! Julie Barton is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts' MFA program and wrote this memoir about a year of her life during which she suffered from depression.

Quote:

“I needed a companion who had no judgment, with whom I had no history, who would make it known that I was loved, who would never, ever hurt me.”

Official Book Summary:

At twenty-two, Julie Barton collapsed on her kitchen floor in Manhattan. She was one year out of college and severely depressed. Summoned by Julie's incoherent phone call, her mother raced from Ohio to New York and took her home.

Psychiatrists, therapists and family tried to intervene, but nothing reached her until the day she decided to do one hopeful thing: adopt a Golden Retriever puppy she named Bunker.

Dog Medicine captures in beautiful, elegiac language the anguish of depression, the slow path to recovery, and the astonishing way animals can heal even the most broken hearts and minds.

Excerpt:

"The walk from the subway to my apartment was six blocks, but I wasn't sure I would make it. I focused on the ground: the scuffed floor of the 4 train, the gum-strewn steps to 86th Street, the swirling black puddle at the corner of Lexington and 85th. I'd lived in Manhattan for almost a year, since one week after graduating from college in Ohio. I'd spent that year as an assistant editor at a book publisher in SoHo. My name appeared in the credits of two books. My boss called me his best assistant ever. I had scraped together enough money to pay my rent and bills, on time. I had caring friends and supportive parents who wanted me to succeed. And I was about to have a breakdown.

Only a few blocks out of the subway station, bloody thoughts descended: Walk into the path of that cab speeding up Lexington Avenue. Step in front of that oncoming bus. These were not voices in my head; they were rogue thoughts, terrible thoughts that I did not know how to control."